by J. J. Keller
He lay there, pain screaming through him and his breath rasping in and out of his lungs. He could not see for colorless noise, and he lapsed in and out of consciousness for how long he could not tell.
Light blossomed in the darkness. Golden hues spilled from a bright void in the sky. Was death coming for him, and would he be reborn? Out here on the brink of oblivion, Lazarus had come back to him.
“If you can just find some more light, I will have reached sufficient cumulative strength to begin copying my genes into your DNA. Then we will survive without light, and I will not leave you in shadow.”
Reigo blinked. He tried to move his hands. Dead pain flowed from his neck down the inside of his arm.
“My clavicle’s broken.” Blood dribbled from his lips. He slid his hands over the Teng steel of the ship’s hull, feeling pitting and irregularities through the gloves protecting his cold fingers.
The light began to fade.
“Reigo, if you do not have light soon, your eyes will be closed forever. When you die, you will be slipping into oblivion, and there will be no comfort for you.”
“Na’Athril?”
Reigo couldn’t stop the tears from flooding his eyes. They fell upon the cracked visor of his helmet, mingling with the blood and flecks of vomit there. “Mother? Oh Mother, what have we brought upon ourselves? What star-crossed doom has befallen us?”
He managed to raise his head a fraction. Through the smeared, cracked visor, he recognized the craters and pockmarks on the hull, and stars in the darkness above. He tried to think. He was facing back toward the airlock. His magnetic boots weren’t working and he couldn’t get his suit’s computer to reboot.
Reigo dug his fingertips into tiny pits and pulled himself forward, by inches. The pain became overwhelming and his vision blurred. He dropped his head back against the hull and breathed.
Gradually, he pulled himself back in the direction of the airlock. The pain segued into a senseless continuum, and the only things he was really aware of were his eyes and his hands and the distorted surface beneath them. Inch by inch, he pulled himself along the shielding. This distance he’d run with an injured morran not long ago now was vast from this perspective. As he crawled, he cooled. Blood congealed and stuck his suit’s lining to his skin. Every joint, every muscle, ached. If he did not cling to the minute dents and imperfections with his fingertips, he would fall away into space. And he did it, because the only other option available to him was to die.
At last his hand found an edge and a change in texture, the airlock door.
The door was closed and, for a moment, he thought it had all been in vain, but then he saw Ogonaovan had left trailing the contacts that initiated the close-open door cycle, and all he had to do was touch them together.
He pulled himself in by the wires, closed the door, and pulled the emergency lever to open the inner door. Air tore in, buffeting his weakened body like a rag doll. He stumbled through the inner door and back into gravity, and with hands dead from the cold he got his helmet off and fought his suit undone.
He couldn’t get his legs out of it, and it remained crumpled around his waist. As he tried to use one of the locker doors to pull himself to his feet, an object fell out, a torch. Lazarus had said it needed light. Just a little light. It would only take a small amount for it to make more enough prions before the bacteria on his skin died from light starvation. His fingers fumbled clumsily over it and he dropped it as the beam came on. It fell on the floor, casting its light on him. Reigo lay down, spent, with his face in the beam. At last he had found light. Lazarus would heal him.
A clatter made him open his eyes. In the paling light the torch threw directly behind it, a tentacled shape swept past. The torch was caught up and the beam swung violently around, then it vanished. The morran scuttled back into the maintenance tunnel.
Reigo reached out to where the morran had gone, his mouth opening and closing mutely, but there was no strength left in him, and he could not move from the floor.
Chapter 9
Reigo’s body was stiff as a corpse, gripped by cold and unable to even shiver. At first he sobbed, for the loss of Ogonaovan, then Lazarus. He hallucinated, but his visions were pale specters of the ones that had once threatened him. His mother’s attempts to kill him turned over in his head. Or had she saved him? She’d thrown him back to the airlock and not into space. She’d crushed Ceril.
At last he slept for an immeasurable time, passing in and out of consciousness until light began to seep into the corridor and, at last, a thin crescent of hard luminescence came before his eyes through the doorway vista of the observation deck, refracting from the concave surface.
Reigo rolled onto his elbows. There was a moon in front of the sun and the emerging sliver of light broke into a dazzling diamond ring threaded with Bailey’s beads. He stretched his fingers toward it, reaching into the long shadows it sent lancing across the floor and walls, but he didn’t crave it, nor exalt in it. It was merely a welcome sunrise after a long dark night.
A door mechanism whirred. Reigo brought saliva to his mouth, trying to choke back the pain as he pushed himself up on his good arm, his other shoulder useless, and struggled to gather his knees beneath him. He slowly turned.
Tiorné stood in the weak starlight the corridor offered. Her posture was bent and betrayed exhaustion. Her face was sunken, her skin ashen. Behind her, Reigo saw the bridge table overturned, the things that had stood upon it scattered on the floor. His mother’s hands were injured, the nails torn and bloodied. She’d been attacking the ship.
“Ogonaovan’s dead.” Reigo paused and his next words came in a shuddering breath. “Isn’t he?”
“Yes. Aspera and Ceril also.”
Reigo understood her last words now. Tempt her. Tempt her against her own reason.
“And Hectar?”
“He lives.” Tiorné’s dark eyes flickered to the panorama of the lunar sunrise. “Though whether his mind is salvable is a different matter.”
Reigo turned to the view outside the observation dome, fists clenched by his sides and eyes blurring with tears.
“Mother,” he said at length, “why is there no corona on that sun?”
His mother smiled humorlessly. “If you had bothered to read up on B-type stars...”
“I would know. Ya.” Reigo let his head fall, leaning his forehead on the window, half closing his eyes. Colored spokes ruptured on his eyelashes from the rising sun. “Can it be? Do the dead persist in the living through some heritable memory, or was that just part of the disease’s strategy?”
Tiorné’s eyes were closed. “Is it better to be ignorant and have that reassurance, than to live one’s life in the shadow of deep uncertainty? Once, I knew it was always better to seek the absolute truth, rather than to be seduced by the thrall of comforting lies, on false promises of security. To expect a life after death is arrogance, selfishness, as the Pagan Atheist says. Once.
“Now I do not know, Reigo. I feel I held resolution and absolute certainty in my hands, and it slipped through my fingers. With Lazarus, I thought there was an answer to everything, and that nothing that could happen to me would do me any lasting harm, and that there was nothing in this galaxy I should fear. Now it is not the same. Death is a black hole. No man can see what lies at the other side of it without going there and never returning. Perhaps it is simple and reassuring to pretend it is something else, something benevolent, but why would it be? In reality it is probably oblivion, and nothing anyone can ever prove. Perhaps this is a disease, a disease that is endemic to man. There are no answers to some questions. That is the way of things. To want...to expect...a guide that will give us answers to everything, for nothing...that’s weakness, folly.”
Reigo said, “There can be no light before darkness. So the Pagan Atheist said. For we are born into darkness, and into darkness we shall all again someday pass.”
Tiorné paused then completed the quote. “Enlightenment is not something that can be gi
ven, or taken, or exchanged. It must be sought and extricated, one piece at a time, from the very stratum of life.” She stared upon the rising sun, its blue light revealing lines at the corner of her eyes Reigo had not noticed before. “Did we make the right choice, Reigo?” Tiorné’s voice seemed infinitely distant. “Would it be better to go quietly to madness than to die a thousand deaths? Can I still die embracing oblivion and knowing that the things I care for have been preserved, and that I have spent the one sacred life that was a gift to me as best I could? Will your future in the universe satisfy me, or shall it not be enough?”
He looked to her face and he saw she beheld him differently. Now Reigo realized an era had passed, an era he could never have back. He had known her all his life, better than anyone, but now she seemed a stranger.
“The right choice.” Reigo set his face grimly. “We made the right choice. For everyone.” Now he had seen the light and turned his back on it, he could never see it again. That was why he would forever be living in the shadow of Lazarus.
About Manda Benson
http://www.lyricalpress.com/store/index.php?main_page=authors&authors_id=117
Manda Benson is an ex-research scientist who lives with a dog, an axolotl, a pink tarantula, and her two savage guard rabbits in a 100-year-old house that seems to exist in a constant cycle of repairs in the Midlands of England. Her other fiction includes a number of short stories plus another Galactic Legacy novel, Dark Tempest; a YA SF novel, Pilgrennon’s Beacon; and two children’s books.
Manda's Website:
http://tangentrine.com/mandabenson
Reader eMail:
[email protected]
About the Galactic Legacy Series
Book 1: Dark Tempest
Available in ebook from Lyrical Press
Book 2: In the Shadow of Lazarus
Available in ebook from Lyrical Press
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